Open Access Scholarship / Littérature savante en libre accès

Open access economics on-the-fly webliography and overview

As of March 26, 2020, this page is in the process of being updated as part of the process of developing a literature review. My goal is to make the latter available for open peer review via this blog no later than June 30, 2020.

Key points OA business models must be sustainable over the long term, and article processing charge payments do not work for all; Subscribe to Open (S2O) is proposed, and being tested, as an alternative model. The S2O model motivates subscribers to participate through economic self-interest, without reliance on institutional altruism or collective behaviour. The S2O offer targets current subscribers, uses existing subscription systems, and recurs annually, allowing publishers to control risk and revert to conventional subscriptions if necessary. An Annual Reviews pilot is currently testing the S2O model with five journals.

The Open Library of Humanities was launched almost half a decade ago with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In this article, we outline the problems we set out to address and the lessons we learned. Specifically, we note that, as we hypothesized, academic libraries are not necessarily classical economic actors; that implementing consortial funding models requires much marketing labour; that there are substantial governance and administrative overheads in our model; that there are complex tax and VAT considerations for consortial arrangements; and that diverse revenue sources remain critical to our success.

In 2016, we wrote about the major cost centres at eLife and how we would structure a new, $2,500 publication fee (approximately £2,000) to begin to recover some of our publishing costs. We explained at the time that the fee for authors, to be introduced in January 2017, would be tied to actual costs at eLife – although it wouldn’t cover them all.

In communicating about how we set the fee, we wanted to achieve a number of things: to promote awareness among authors of the basis for the fees they and their institutions are asked to pay for open-access publishing; to create downward pressure on the high fees at some other selective journals; to suggest that the actual costs of publishing should be part of the conversation around long-term funding for open access; and to encourage more publishers to share information about costs. As a non-profit organisation operating with capital from four funders and research-performing organisations, we felt taking this approach was important and could be of value to other organisations.

The Open Access Publishing Cooperative Study was a two-year investigation, undertaken under the auspices of the Public Knowledge Project with the support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The intent of this initiative was to examine whether scholarly publishing models, involving cooperation between the relevant stakeholder, might provide a means of moving subscription journals to a sustainable form of open access publishing. The study explored potential cooperative associations involving disciplines, national initiatives, and regional models. It utilized a series of (a) three case studies, (b) a publishing industry/library survey and interviews, (c) a publishing internship, and (d) a number of related technical developments with Open Journal Systems.

By way of an executive summary, what was found in the course of this investigation was that the organizations involved, including research libraries, scholarly publishers, learned societies, and research funding agencies, generally recognized the value of cooperation and cooperatives in principle. However, while the vast majority of the research libraries surveyed were prepared to explore the setting up of an open access cooperative with publishers that would initially be based on providing a subscription-equivalent level of support for the journals converting to open access, the journal editors and publishers were not nearly as inclined or prepared to consider such an strategy.

Universities UK (2017). Monitoring the transition to open access: December 2017.

U15 = Canada’s 15 largest universities. Statement repeated in full below as this is highly relevant to the work of Sustaining the Knowledge Commons:

Preamble

Access to research and scholarly outputs is essential for scientific discovery, innovation, and education. To maximize knowledge transfer and impact, our researchers’ work must be made readily available around the globe. Research-intensive universities also require timely and continuing access to international research results and scholarship in order to advance and disseminate knowledge, and to develop the next generation of researchers. This research life cycle depends upon a healthy communication ecosystem anchored in the following principles:

Open Access

The U15 shares international concerns regarding the necessity for an accessible and sustainable model of scholarly publishing. We are committed to the widest possible access to research and scholarly outputs.

Public Interest

An individual or an institution’s access to research results should not be limited by their ability to pay for that access. The U15 is committed to disseminating scholarly publications and other research outputs as widely as possible in order to maximize their economic, cultural, social and health benefits, and the effectiveness of public investments in research.

Quality

Critical evaluation of research lies at the heart of intellectual discourse and scientific method. The U15 supports rigorous peer review processes and effective research impact measures in all forms of academic publishing including articles, monographs and books. It also recognises that there is an unavoidable cost for the substantial expertise that is contributed to scholarly endeavours in the humanities and social sciences by not-for-profit university presses.

Accountability

The highest possible proportion of public dollars invested in research and education should be spent directly on research and education. While supportive of strong private-sector relationships, and understanding the complexities of scholarly publishing, the U15 is concerned that the business model that is prevalent among for-profit book and journal publishers may impose undue financial pressure on the research and education ecosystem.

Innovation

The digital environment provides new opportunities for accessing and preserving a wide range of research outputs within a global knowledge commons. The U15 encourages the collaborative development of new models of scholarly communications that would benefit the academy and the public by leveraging the power of the digital age in ways that enhance the quality of scholarly and scientific publica

Preamble

Access to research and scholarly outputs is essential for scientific discovery, innovation, and education. To maximize knowledge transfer and impact, our researchers’ work must be made readily available around the globe. Research-intensive universities also require timely and continuing access to international research results and scholarship in order to advance and disseminate knowledge, and to develop the next generation of researchers. This research life cycle depends upon a healthy communication ecosystem anchored in the following principles:

Open Access

The U15 shares international concerns regarding the necessity for an accessible and sustainable model of scholarly publishing. We are committed to the widest possible access to research and scholarly outputs.

Public Interest

An individual or an institution’s access to research results should not be limited by their ability to pay for that access. The U15 is committed to disseminating scholarly publications and other research outputs as widely as possible in order to maximize their economic, cultural, social and health benefits, and the effectiveness of public investments in research.

Quality

Critical evaluation of research lies at the heart of intellectual discourse and scientific method. The U15 supports rigorous peer review processes and effective research impact measures in all forms of academic publishing including articles, monographs and books. It also recognises that there is an unavoidable cost for the substantial expertise that is contributed to scholarly endeavours in the humanities and social sciences by not-for-profit university presses.

Accountability

The highest possible proportion of public dollars invested in research and education should be spent directly on research and education. While supportive of strong private-sector relationships, and understanding the complexities of scholarly publishing, the U15 is concerned that the business model that is prevalent among for-profit book and journal publishers may impose undue financial pressure on the research and education ecosystem.

Innovation

The digital environment provides new opportunities for accessing and preserving a wide range of research outputs within a global knowledge commons. The U15 encourages the collaborative development of new models of scholarly communications that would benefit the academy and the public by leveraging the power of the digital age in ways that enhance the quality of scholarly and scientific publications.

This article reviews the ways through which subscription-based scholarly journals have converted to open access. The methodology included a comprehensive literature review of both published and ‘grey’ literature, such as blog posts and press releases. Eight interviews were also conducted with stakeholders representing different parts of the scholarly publishing landscape. Strategies of conversion for different types of journals are presented at multiple levels (publishers, national, research funders, organizational, and so on). The identified scenarios are split into two main categories, those that rely heavily on article processing charges and those that can operate without relying on author-side financing. Despite there being interesting and important shared traits among many converted journals, individual circumstances largely dictate what options for conversion are viable for a journal. There is no single solution that works for every journal but rather a broad selection of different solutions, among which selection should be well informed.

Schonfeld, Roger C. (2016). A taxonomy of university presses today. The Scholarly Kitchen Oct. 13, 2016. Schonfield presents a very useful summary of the situation for university presses today in the transition to open access. Following is the first paragraph which includes what looks like some very interesting links:

We raise the financial and ethical issue of paying for getting papers published in professional journals. Indian researchers have published more than 37,000 papers in over 880 open access journals from 61 countries in the five years between 2010 and 2014 as seen from Science Citation Index Expanded. This accounts for about 14.4% of India’s overall publication output, considerably higher than the 11.6% from the world. Indian authors have used 488 open access (OA) journals which levy article processing charges (APC), ranging from INR 500 to US$5,000 per paper publish about 15,400 papers. More than half of these papers were published in just 13 journals. PLoS One and Current Science are the OA journals Indian researchers use most often. Most leading Indian journals are open access and they do not charge APC. Use of OA journals levying APC has increased over the period of four years;they were 242 journals which published 2557 papers in 2010 which rose to 328 journals that published 3,634 papers in 2014. There has been an increase in the use of non-APC journals as well, but at a lower pace. About 27% of all Indian papers in OA journals are in Clinical Medicine, and 11.7% in Chemistry. Indian researchers have used nine mega journals to publish 3,100 papers. We estimate that India is potentially spending about US$2.4 million annually on APCs and suggest that it would be prudent for Indian authors to make their work freely available through interoperable repositories, a trend that is growing significantly in Latin America and China, especially when research is facing funding crunch. We further suggest bringing all Indian OA journals on to a single platform similar to SciELO, and all repositories be harvested by CSIR-URDIP which is already managing the OA repositories of the laboratories of CSIR, DBT and DST. Such resource sharing will not only result in enhanced efficiency and reduced overall costs, but will also facilitate use of standard metadata among repositories.

This page reflects an open approach to writing one of the forthcoming projects of SKC research. Eventually this work, or portions of it, may become formal publications, however in the short term I think it is more important to gather and share this information on an ongoing basis considering how many different streams of research and information-sharing are in progress.

One of the overall goals of Sustaining the Knowledge Commons is to periodically update my analysis of the potential for a global economic flip to open access first published in First Monday in 2013. My arguments in brief:

the vast majority of revenue for scholarly journals comes from academic library budgets

this revenue is more than sufficient to fund a fully open access scholarly journal publishing system

a fully OA scholarly journal publishing system is achievable at substantially less cost than the existing system

cost savings cannot be assumed; for example, some journals charge APCs higher than traditional average global spend per article by academic libraries; if the average tends toward these higher prices an OA system would cost more

cost savings are most likely if careful attention is paid to supporting more efficient processes; for example, Edgar & Willinsky in a survey of close to a thousand journals using OJS found an average revenue of $188 per article. This is approximately 4% of current spend. Exploring the potential of this DIY sector by ensuring that factors such as journal hosting and support are included and ensuring that these journals have sufficient resources for ongoing operation would be one way to approach research to support an economically sustainable OA ecosystem

seeking cost efficiencies would be wise because universities and research organizations have limited funding and new needs such as support for research data and institutional repositories; we need to transition the existing economics to do more, not just to support OA, important as this goal is

Transitioning a global economic system is an enormous task. Fortunately, there are many people working on this question, including academics and funders of research and research support services. I’ll need to gather information, links and citations on all this work to inform the next update on the global potential for a shift to open access. Continuing in the spirit of open research of the SKC project, I’ll be doing this work on an ad hoc basis online, adding links and organizing as time permits, and I hope that in the near future this page will become a useful resource for everyone working in this area. This is also an opportunity for me to highlight sectors such as DIY publishing and cooperatives that I see as more likely to lead to sustainable OA to balance the extensive work the SKC does on the OA APC longitudinal study.

Your feedback and suggestions are welcome via the contact form on this page. If you would appreciate attribution please indicate this with your comment. I am envisioning a list of contributors to add to the end of the page. Links and citations will be attributed only as necessary to find the original work; substantive contributions will be attributed in the text.

Organization: to start with this will page will serve as an overview section / Table of Contents with links to specific sections

The SOAP (Study of Open Access Publishing) project has compiled data on the present offer for open access publishing in online peer-reviewed journals. Starting from the Directory of Open Access Journals, several sources of data are considered, including inspection of journal web site and direct inquiries within the publishing industry.

Several results are derived and discussed, together with their correlations: the number of open access journals and articles; their subject area; the starting date of open access journals; the size and business models of open access publishers; the licensing models; the presence of an impact factor; the uptake of hybrid open access. In addition, a number of qualitative features of open access publishing, relevant to understand the present landscape, are described.

Note: the SOAP study was a major study beginning in 2008 involving traditional publishers and members of the open access community working together.